


Sleight of Hand

by rosepetalfall



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide Madness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28171899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/pseuds/rosepetalfall
Summary: They aren’t naturally well suited, she and the god. Dove knows that.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Sleight of Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChokolatteJedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/gifts).



They aren’t naturally well suited, she and the god. Dove knows that. 

_ He  _ certainly knows it, though now she mostly seems to amuse him. She’ll take that over the alternatives. She’s seen and read enough to know that being beloved of a god can be a very dangerous thing. But surely being disliked would be worse. 

He seems to enjoy showing up at inconvenient moments, for his own obscure reasons. He appears, laughing or frowning or picking at his nails, and her body cannot help but recognize that she and him and the islands are bound, that her allegiance, both willing and begrudging, is his. 

* * *

It is an early morning in the fifth year of her reign and there hasn’t been a visit in more than seven months, not even to Aly. So when Dove finds herself suddenly sliding down out of a window seat, forehead pressed to the cool floor of her bedroom, she thinks with a thread of irritation, that she really ought to have expected this. 

“Hello, little bird,” Kyprioth says, conversational, as if they’re picking up some interrupted thread of thought from dinner the night before. “It occurred to me that for a mortal it might feel as though I hadn’t come by for quite some time. I hope you haven’t been feeling neglected.”

“I promise I really haven’t,” Dove says, still prostrated on the floor. It is terribly clean. The household staff can never be faulted. 

“Ah, but what kind of patron would I be, if I didn’t check in?” Kyprioth says. She hears him snap his fingers. “Now, I had a thought about how we might deal with your thorny little prob-”

Dove grits her teeth to keep in a sigh. Everything  _ had _ been going a little too smoothly lately, Aly had said in an undertone, just the other day. So of course they were due for some trouble. “Perhaps if we’re going to discuss matters of state,” Dove cuts in, “I could sit up first?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” and her muscles are her own again. 

Dove sits up, rolls her shoulders back, and gets to her feet. “You were saying something about thorns?” 

Kyprioth steeples his fingers and smiles. 

(She never forgets what he is capable of doing. She keeps her fear of him and her bone-smashing anger at how disposable they all are to him hidden away in a quiet corner of her heart. Not festering but not decaying, either. A reminder of why she and all the raka going back generations have been raised knowing not to call out his name lightly, in case he might answer. 

Perhaps it is to his credit that he never mentions it, or perhaps he simply enjoys that she can be duplicitous. A sign that she really is one of his, for however much neither of them would have chosen it to be so.)

“Trickster here for fun?” Secret asks in a suspicious tone, unpeeling from around Dove’s neck to sit on her shoulder. “Or not for fun?” 

“Oh, boatloads of fun,” Kyprioth says, flashing what feels like too many teeth to be in a single mouth. “I always am.” 

Dove hums in response, a careful sound honed from years of royal audiences, conveying neither agreement nor disagreement. It works, she’s found, about equally as well on gods as it does on humans. 

“And exactly what kind of fun do you have in mind at the moment?” she asks, folding her hands together, steadying herself for another day’s negotiation.

She’s practiced at it by this point. 

* * *

People say, now, that it was fitting. For her to be the prophesied one. Another sleight of hand. How like the Trickster, how like the Isles.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually do Yuletide in any form, but I was browsing the prompts and I've loved the Trickster's series for many, many years and still occasionally re-read. Dove was always my favorite character and I loved the idea of writing a little more about her and Kyprioth years down the line and how they relate to one another. I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
